Garlic Sauce with Walnuts or Almonds. Add to semicrushed almonds
or nuts as much as you want of clean garlic, and grind best at the same
time, as is sufficient, sprinkling continually with a bit of water so it
does not produce oil. Put into the ground ingredients bread crumbs softened
in meat or fish stock, and grind again. If it seems too hard, it can be
easily softened in the same juice. It will keep very easily to the time
we mentioned for mustard. My friend Callimachus is very greedy for this
dish, even though it is of little nourishment, delays a long time in the
stomach, dulls the vision and warms the liver. (Milham, 359)

Rather Highly Colored Garlic Sauce. Do this in the way mentioned
above [for the garlic sauce with walnuts or almonds]. Do not soak in water
or juice, but in the must of red grapes, pressed by hand and cooked for
a half hour. This can even be done with cherry juice. This is more nourishing
than what we described before. (Milham, 361)

Modern recipe: Almonds or Walnuts and Garlic Sauce

For 160:

1 1/4 gallons walnuts or almonds or a combination

40 cloves cloves garlic

1 1/4 gallons bread crumbs, unseasoned

3 3/4 quarts beef or veal stock

For 8:

1 cup walnuts or almonds or a combination

2 cloves garlic

1 cup bread crumbs, unseasoned

3/4 cup beef or veal stock

Combine the nuts and garlic in a food processor and grin until fine.
Add the bread crumbs and stock and continue processing until combined well.
If needed, thicken with more bread crumbs or thin with more stock until
desired consistency is reached.

Nuts take a great deal of time to crush by hand in a mortar, but
an abundance of kitchen help would take care of this problem. Our guess
is that a good knife and a few hits of a good wooden roller would crush
the almonds or walnuts sufficiently to count as semi-crushed in Platina's
first instruction of this recipe. To this, he would have added freshly
peeled garlic and ground it again, though the addition of sprinkled water
perplexes us. We have not seen an oily mixture produced during hand grinding,
nor do we understand why this oil might not be desirable in the sauce.

To the ground ingredients, Platina has soaked crumbs added suggesting
meat or fish stock as the juice used for softening the bread. Both juices
are suggested perhaps as alternatives for meat-eating and meatless days.
Bread crumbs added, the mixture is ground one more time and if too hard,
it is softened with more of the same juice used to soak the bread crumbs.
For the highly colored garlic sauce, the only change would be the use of
dark grape must as the alternative to meat or fish stock.

Platina says that the sauce will last as long as a previously mentioned
mustard sauce, which is not so much a measure of time as a statement of
shape and transport. The mustard sauce recipe has the cook shaping the
sauce into little balls. To be done with this sauce would require a significant
reduction in the liquid, enough to make a doughy mixture. As with the mustard
recipe, the balls could be shaped, dried, and transported wherever needed,
at which time they would be soaked "in verijuice or vinegar, or must"
(Milham, 359) to soften them and use them as a sauce.

Texture and crumbs:

Although the recipe works with commercial bread crumbs, the resulting
sauce seems overly grainy to our taste buds. We suggest trimming the crusts
off your stale bread pieces and using stale bread in the sauce rather than
commercial crumbs. The resulting sauce is much smoother in texture. Do
not be tempted to add more crumbs during the initial mixing. The sauce
will thicken as it stands and additional crumbs will only make the sauce
more like pudding. Wait at least 20-30 minutes before adding more crumbs
if you think the sauce is too thin, likewise for more stock. The sauce
should be spoonable, not pourable, when it is complete.

Sauce amounts:

Although the amounts stated here are listed for 8 and 160 servings,
you may be able to get away with a little less. We chose to serve these
amounts because less appeared to be skimpy, even in appropriately sized
bowls. If you are serving the highly colored sauce, we believe you can
successfully serve twice the number of people than what is listed in this
recipe because many people will find the fruity taste odd (though not unpleasant).

Gaylin Walli is a technical writer and editor for a multinational
software company. She spends the vast majority of her personal time researching
things because her friends (and people throughout the known world) torture
her with comments like
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